The problems inherent in clerical marriage
would drastically
alter the Catholic Church.

When clergy marry: An insider’s view

By Lynnewood F. Martin

    No matter how decisively His Holiness John Paul II spells out the requirement for the clergy to remain celibate, proponents keep bringing it up. Without denying the advantages of lifting the celibacy rule, the Holy Father, exercising his pastoral discretion, does not think a married clergy expedient in the Roman Rite. Proponents of a married priesthood argue (1) that it would solve the priest shortage, and (2) that married priests would be more understanding of the problems of Catholic marriage; especially in regard to the Church’s restrictions on birth control and divorce and remarriage.

    Having been a married Protestant pastor for a decade before my conversion, I don’t think Catholics understand the problems which a married clergy—inevitably—would bring to the Church. I served mission and rural congregations during my ministry both during and after my studies at a seminary. I was married and our children were born during this period. The denomination with which I was affiliated practiced congregational autonomy, so I had no hierarchy to deal with except the elected “board” of each congregation, but I had many conversations with the married pastors and clergy of hierarchical and magisterial denominations. My parents at various times attended Disciples of Christ or Methodist churches and, as semi-professional musicians, were involved in the music departments of the various congregations to which we belonged as we moved about. My parents were religious but not pious. Neither of these denominations stresses piety or sacraments, and their houses of worship are more accurately called “meeting houses” than churches in the Catholic idea of church as sacred space. I now know that what I felt was lacking in my life was a dependable religious authority, piety and a sense of sacred space.

    In high school I read George Elliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life and Upton Sinclair’s Elmer Gantry. I recommend both books to anyone advocating or even wondering about a married clergy for the Catholic Church. Even with this background I still opted for the ministry, because personal experiences convinced me that this was God’s will for me. I married my high school sweetheart who came from a quite different religious tradition, so she had little idea of the role of a parsonage spouse. When I came to the conclusion that I was ineffectual because I am temperamentally unsuited for that denomination’s version of the ministry—more evangelistic than pastoral—I returned to university studies. I retrained as a teacher and as an historian—a field which has fascinated me since childhood. Unfortunately the new role of “graduate student’s spouse” proved too great a strain on the marriage as is often the case. My wife took the younger children and left. I regret the breakup of the marriage, but not the determination to return to school. It was in graduate school at Saint Louis University that I came to understand the Church of Rome’s claims and theology and converted in the heady days following Vatican II. My doctoral studies combined history with Catholic philosophy and religious studies, so I investigated the Roman Catholic Church in detail.

    Since I converted I have been appalled as the Church abandoned traditions centuries old and opted for changes to ways main line Protestantism has tried and found wanting. I am mystified by arguments by Catholic theologians that a particular custom or practice dates “only” from the 11th (or 13th or 16th) century. Why should something which has served the spiritual needs of Catholics for seven or eight centuries be discarded solely because it is only seven or eight centuries old? The problem of a “back to the Bible” approach to religious practice is that the contemporary Church is not the struggling minority Church of the first century, and we can’t make it so. The meaning of any Scripture, they teach, is the meaning the author intended, and fundamentalists spend much time trying to learn what words and terms in the Bible may have meant to the Scripture’s writers. This was the whole idea underlying the theology, polity and practice of the denomination I left. For all their preaching about “the early church” their churches are indistinguishable from other fundamentalist and evangelistic churches. (Actually the term “church” is not used in the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic versions of the Bible.) The fact is that the Catholic Church has evolved as it has grown. That the Church can evolve is the blessing of having a Pope who can speak authoritatively on faith and morals. When the Bible is the sole statement of God’s will and private interpretation is the rule, Bible study can be an agony for the conscientious Christian. As Catholics we have St. Peter’s successor with the “keys to the Kingdom” to interpret and pronounce on the meaning of Scripture, and on faith and morals.

    This is the background I bring to the problem of a married Catholic clergy. I shall proceed from the least important problems: (1) the economics of a married clergy, to the very important personal considerations: (2) the pastor and the parsonage family, to the all important (3) pastoral concerns.

1. The economics of a married clergy

    First, a married priesthood is going to cost more—a lot more—and Catholics are notoriously poor givers. We aren’t the only Christians with this problem. A friend ministering to the former Evangelical and Reformed Church (now part of The United Church of Christ) attributed his flock’s poor giving to the fact that their grandparents in Europe paid a church tax collected by their various governments, so they had never evolved a tradition of weekly free will offerings. Lay Catholics’ attitudes may have been shaped similarly. A married priest will have had at least eight years of college plus some time as a curate. This is as much preparation as a physician or a university professor must have, and the married pastor will expect to be paid accordingly. They probably will not expect to be paid the physician’s average annual salary, ($150,000 in 1995) but they would expect to earn as much as the annual salary of a full professor at a university ($50,000 in 1995). Medical insurance for a family is much more expensive than for a single person, as is driver’s insurance, and a married priest will need life insurance and a more expensive pension program. Since mission congregations and parishes in poor neighborhoods may be unable to afford such expense, the diocese will have to make up the difference by assessing wealthier congregations. To require married priests to live on whatever salary each parish can collect will initiate a scramble for the prosperous parishes and is likely to engender hard feelings in those forced to live on much less, so the salaries of priests must remain uniform, and the diocese will need to make up the difference in less affluent parishes.

    Supporting a family will necessitate more homilies about money. One of the most frequently voiced complaints about Protestant ministers is, “He’s always talking about money.” (The problem of inducing priests to move their families into poor neighborhoods will be discussed under part two.) Clergy pensions will become more expensive, and, if the priest’s marriage breaks up, shall the Church pay alimony and child support? Parishioners who are being urged to contribute more will demand a part in the decision about which pastor should be appointed and about the removal of an unsatisfactory pastor. A pastor with a family to support will be tempted to avoid controversy and pander to the feelings and wishes of the parish. (More about this in part 3.)

    New parsonages will have to be built or the existing parsonages remodeled from a dormitory and offices for celibate priests into family residences. If a parish has more than one priest other residences will be needed or a housing allowance must be budgeted. Unless a parsonage is provided, the parish will face the problem of the commuting pastor who lives outside the parish.

    It is unlikely that any parish will have more than two priests—a pastor and a curate—no matter how affluent the parishioners because of the expense. The irony is that there are likely to be plenty of priests available if very many of those thousands who left the priesthood solely to marry return—and if they are accepted back. Every Protestant denomination has the problem of finding pastorates for all of the qualified ministers who seek them, so there are thousands of people trained as Protestant ministers who are unable to find a pastorate. Economically a married clergy would be as great a financial blow to the Church as has been the departure of so many religious women and brothers from the orders. Dioceses will have to find the extra moneys by limiting or discontinuing other activities. My hunch is that the parochial school system will be the most likely sacrifice.

2. The pastor and the parsonage family

    A pastor is in a unique position because the task calls for moral judgments both spoken and lived. “Be not many of you pastors because of the stricter judgment,” wrote St. Paul. Dante was more blunt when he wrote that, “The road to hell is paved with the heads of priests.” Although the Church asserts that the moral life of the priest is irrelevant to the validity of the priestly sacraments, we are influenced by our perception of a priest’s moral life. When a pastor is married the spouse becomes a part of our perception of the pastor. If there are children, they too become a part of our perception of the pastor. If the spouse is active in the parish this activity is assumed to be the will of the pastor, and the same is true if the spouse is a passive participant. But what if the spouse refuses to participate in parish life? Unfortunately this problem also involves the pastor’s children. Protestantism calls the latter “p.k.’s” for “preacher’s kids,” and it is rarely used as a compliment—even by the p.k.’s. The “p.k.” phenomenon arises from the children’s awareness that they are expected to be model children by the parish and are watched accordingly. Pastors often caution their children to be good because of the parents’ position.

    I haven’t had much experience observing women pastors, but when the pastor is a man I have known many wives of pastors to rebel under the strain of being the “perfect” pastor’s wife. I’ve been told that wives of priests in the Eastern Orthodox Churches “solve” this problem by dressing in black and remaining out of sight. Not so the Protestant minister’s wife. (I suspect there are few among Roman Catholic women who would submit to such a regimen.) Many Protestant churches are as demanding of the pastor’s wife as of the pastor. Does she play the organ? Can she direct the choir? Do her children behave in church? at home? at school? Is she a good housekeeper? Does she drink? smoke? Is she friendly? Catholics might add to these tests, is she a daily communicant? It’s not surprising that many pastor’s wives have abandoned religious practice.

    One of the most discouraging experiences in the ministry for me was encounters with ministers’ wives who were skeptical, cynical and embittered by their experiences. Given the pressures, the wonder is that so many spouses endure. In my experience the wives who best coped with the difficulties inherent in their situation were the daughters of ministers. (I understand that this is true of physicians’ wives as well.) This poses the threat of a clergy caste arising on the order of the extended families in many police departments. Most medieval historians cite the fear of an hereditary priesthood as an important consideration in decreeing priestly celibacy in the Roman Rite c. 1000 A.D.

    Catholics today treat the parsonage as the parish office, and in most parishes, rooms in the parsonage are used as office and pastoral study. It has proven virtually impossible to end this attitude in Protestant parishes where the parsonage is a family’s home. For this reason many Protestant ministers prefer to have the parsonage in a neighborhood distant from the church. An uncle of mine, a layman, rented the former parsonage next door to the Protestant church of which he and his wife were members. He found that the congregation still felt free to intrude into his home to use the telephone or the bathroom or for their children to wait to be picked up after a youth meeting at the church.

    Ministers are largely on their own as far as the structure of their day is concerned, and this can pose a problem for married ministers. If the spouse is overwhelmed with housework and child care the temptation to let ministerial duties slide in order to relieve the spouse is understandable, and Protestant ministers are frequently found at home during the day. If the spouse also has a career this intrusion on the minister’s time becomes greater. Since I ministered to small congregations, missions really, I usually supplemented my income by teaching, so structuring my day was seldom a problem. However, I was amazed at how much idle time full-time resident ministers seemed to have. A Catholic priest would have a more structured day if the practice of daily Masses continues.

    The Catholic Church has gotten bad publicity recently because of revelations of pederasty practiced by priests and efforts by the hierarchy to cover up the problem. One of the first reactions to this news is to associate pederasty with priestly celibacy, but pederasty occurs in every religious denomination, as does adultery, incest, rape and sexual child abuse. Marriage will not stop sexual peccadilloes (e.g., Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart). The spouse of a minister once told my wife that she had insisted her randy husband get a vasectomy because she feared he would impregnate some woman and that the scandal would cost them their living. He also developed a shoplifting habit which did end his ministry in that church. In the years since I left the seminary I have learned of over a dozen sex scandals which involved (and usually ended the ministries of) some men in that class of fifty. All but one of these ministers were married.

    I was invited to lunch by another minister one Monday, and I saw him take money from the bank deposit bag holding the Sunday collection. He jokingly said that ours was a “business” lunch so the church should pay for it. Such things happen, and such rationalization must be easier on the conscience if the money is taken for the parsonage family’s use. For this reason most Protestant churches have a finance committee whose chairperson counts the collections. Priests have absconded with the collection too, but not very often. I think one reason for this is that priests are not stressed out by the need to support a family.

3. Pastoral concerns

    St. Paul, the Apostle much maligned in our era, said (and I paraphrase) that the person who is single can be devoted to those things which please God, but the married person must give thought to those things which will please the spouse. I have been impressed when priests of inner city parishes remained in their parish residence while the Protestant ministers moved their families to the “safety” of the suburbs.

    In a sex-obsessed era priestly celibacy is a powerful moral antidote to those who regard sex as essential to well-being. The Kinsey report came to the conclusion that everybody’s doing it, and Masters and Johnson reduced sexual intercourse to the mechanical. Sigmund Freud’s theories about the dangers of repressed sexuality on mental health are now conventional wisdom, although never demonstrated by experimentation. Celibates are regarded as unfulfilled and probably “burning”; a term which is used by St. Paul in another context and also usually misinterpreted. (I’m waiting for a novel, TV drama, or film to feature a nun’s life in which she chooses to remain celibate and in the religious life. The religious person who abandons celibacy and the religious life for marriage has become a cliché in drama, but the media keep grinding them out.)

    The argument is often advanced that “only a married person can understand the problems of married life.” I have never heard of any counseling service requiring the counselor to be married, or of a counseling training program requiring marriage. Marriage is not required because it is not an essential for competent counseling. In fact if the counselor generalizes on personal experience it may do more harm than good. This is true because such experience is subjective, and the counselor, to be competent, must view the subject objectively. On the other hand, when counseling unmarried parishioners whose problem is remaining celibate the counselor’s celibacy can be a strong example to counter the prevailing wisdom about the “necessity” for sexual release and fulfillment.

    A married priest will be pressured to conform just as those of us in business and the professions must conform. Principles can be a liability in the age of multinational conglomerate corporations and an unstable job market. From the White House to the local fast food franchise trimming one’s moral sails to adjust to the prevailing corporate wind is the sine qua non for mere survival; let alone preferment. Teachers are under pressure to dumb down their courses to avoid difficulty with parents, administrators and school boards. Physicians are under pressure from the insurers to sidestep their professional judgment and keep medical care cheap. A “whistle blower” in industry is likely to be permanently unemployed. The priest may be under some pressure to conform, to be a team player, and to get excited only about politically correct matters. If he chooses to resist these pressures the celibate priest is much freer to do so than would be the married priest. Taking a stand which may injure one’s family is much more difficult, because there are so many ways corporate structures, religious, economic or educational, can injure the individual—and subsequently a spouse and children. To please and appease the boss is a necessity for any employee, and priests are no exception to this necessity. Five centuries ago Francis Bacon wrote, “He that hath taken wife and children hath given hostage to fortune, for they are the impediments of great enterprise . . . .”

    Finally, there is the question of priorities for the priesthood. The priest who has left the priesthood to marry irregularly has shown us his priority. If he remains in that condition does the Church want him back? What moral strength does his life demonstrate? Can he call on us to resist the world, the flesh and the devil when he couldn’t or wouldn’t? Can we effectively be called to sacrificial service of God by priests who were unable to overcome the urge to marry? We are told that for them marriage is a need, and if these priests are to return to the pastoral ministry their marriages must be regularized. Statistically about half of the marriages in America end in divorce. Among Catholics the percentage is smaller, but so many Catholics have divorced that parishes are holding meetings to advise the laity on the annulment process. If priests felt such a need to marry that they sacrificed their ministry for marriage, what happens when the priest and spouse divorce? Unless the regularizing marriage had a spiritual defect which invalidated the sacrament, the priest will be in the same situation as when he was celibate and “needed” to marry. His “need” to marry will not disappear.

    Allowing priests to marry sounds simple and it might solve the priest shortage if the fallen away were welcomed back. But the problems inherent in clerical marriage would drastically alter the Catholic Church as it did when Protestantism reintroduced clerical marriage five centuries ago. There is today in many Catholic parishes a trend towards “protestantizing” the liturgy, to place more emphasis on preaching and less emphasis on pious practice and the sacraments. I see this trend being accelerated if priests are allowed to marry. The Holy Father insists on priestly celibacy against enormous pressure. He knows that the “cure” of a married priesthood in the Western Church would be worse than the ills it is supposed to heal.

Dr. Lynnewood F. Martin was raised as a Protestant, studied for the ministry and was ordained for the Churches of Christ. While studying history at St. Louis University he converted to the Catholic Church. He was married but his wife left him; he has been celibate since 1979. Dr. Martin teaches history at Longview Community College in a Kansas City suburb. This is his first article for HPR.

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